Working From Home, Working Out Of The Office, Working In The Office

 

Just over a week since everyone was getting nostalgic about the first day of lockdown in March 2020 and now the Prime Minister has come out and said we've "had enough day's off working at home," and should "make a stab at going back to the office." 

I was pleased to see the Prime Minister's statement because last May there were reports that Johnson had asked his advisors to come up with a catchy slogan to "send the fearful back to work." I'd started to worry that even the fabled nudge unit had been defeated this time, but just in time here they are with, "You've had enough time off at home, now get back to the office!"

Of course, there have been changing attitudes to the office over the years in HM Revenue and Customs. In Customs and Excise the first VAT compliance officers were supposed to be out visiting all week and only expected in the office on Friday to hand-write their reports, draft letters for the typists and hit the pub by lunchtime ( Excise officers were out gauging, Customs officers were looking in suitcases).  The support staff were trapped in the office with paper files, adding machines and telephones.

As PC's were rolled out, the compliance officers were drawn into the office more often to interrogate spreadsheets and (slowly) type their own letters. Towards 2000 they brought in office-based teams to pre-vet cases so that visits were only made to traders who might yield enough money to justify the petrol costs. When HMCE merged with the Inland Revenue to form HM Revenue and Customs, new technology was devised to pre-vet the cases. The teams that used to do the pre-vetting could use phones and email to do the work the compliance officers used to do. And the number of visiting officers could be drastically cut.

It was the same story for the processing staff. New technology meant less jobs and fewer offices. The one big difference was that in the final days of HMCE the compliance officers had been issued with laptops and docking stations. So the remaining audit officers had the option of working out of the office - whether that was at a trader's premises or working at home they weren't tied to the office. For processing and support staff, stuck with desktop PC's, working from home was a rare privilege. 

Thinking back to the first week of lockdown back in March 2020, it's hard to remember now that when the pandemic first surfaced, it seemed like a minor distraction in HM Revenue and Customs. Some offices were trying to cope with the disruption caused by the Brexit Hokey Cokey. My own office was  in the middle of a delayed redundancy scheme under the office closure programme, known as 'Building Our Future' (or, 'Building Someone Else's Future But Not Yours'). 

Delays in announcing the scheme had raised paranoia for those who wanted to go, and offered the illusion of hope for those who wanted to stay. When COVID hit, we'd just got to the point of sitting  down with staff to confirm whether they were within reasonable travelling distance for any of the new offices. 

Over the week beginning 16th March, the message finally came through that this Covid thing was something serious. The official line from the chief executive was: "if you are able to do your job at home, you should do so - speak to your manager about this." But the problem was that "if". The management of some sections of HMRC, particularly the processing sections, had always been adamant that the technology would not allow working from home. That had been part of the sticking point of the redundancy and relocation process. 

Luckily, HMRC had been ahead of other Government departments in replacing its PC's with surface pro's and docking stations. It had seemed an extravagance at the time, but now made it easy for us to send home the initial tranche of "vulnerable" workers under our duty of care. At first, they had problems logging on from home. The "Virtual Private Network"* which kept the data secure, couldn't cope with the number of people suddenly using it.

(*The VPN is like a digital hosepipe that HMRC uses to connect the Surface Pro to its own computers. This means the HMRC information is safe, even though it's threaded out through your home WiFi. That's as technical as I get)

And then, someone increased the capacity! What a revelation. All of a sudden, the technology could cope with people working from home. Some cynics suspected the capacity of the VPN had been kept low on purpose and that it was just a case of management wanting to keep their foot on the staff's collective throat. But whatever the reason, it meant that the rest of the staff could work at home , just as the main lockdown kicked in.

I have to admit - there are some bits of software that were not suited to laptops. And some combinations of software that didn't work so well remotely. And the home situation of some staff meant they preferred to keep going into the office. 

As a manager working remotely, I found I missed the ability to look up and see who was on the floor, and maybe wander round and see what they were up to. Working from home, I could check who was logged into various systems and what they were doing, but it took longer and didn't have that immediacy. The staff also lost that ability to turn to someone working next to them and ask their opinion about some piece of work. Again, they could "talk" to colleagues by phoning them, or messaging them, but it's difficult to know if someone is busy, or if your question is urgent enough to warrant disturbing them. 

On the other hand, they didn't have to make the journey into work. They were able to start work earlier and weren't already worn down by the journey. And as soon as they finished, they could shut down the surface pro, and they were at home.

The opposite was the case for staff still going into the office (HMRC issued "keyworker" letters). They had to make a journey that now seemed longer if they were using reduced public transport services with all that early paranoia. Everything had been "socially distanced" in the office, so you had to remember to shout "hello" before going into the toilets (one in, one out), and at lunch time most of the shops and cafes had been shut down. 

I thought that when I did go into the office I'd get more work done because there were less staff in the office. But that wasn't the case. I still had to remotely manage my staff and take part in closely scheduled  "Microsoft Teams" meetings. But as soon as you were present in the office, you became a sitting duck for people bringing you questions and problems that you obviously wouldn't have fallen for if you'd been at home.

I tend to remember things from my own selfish perspective, but one thing is clear. It wasn't a day off or an easy option for anyone. Working from home, or working in a depopulated office threw up its own challenges.

For offices that weren't due to close, a big concern was how they would manage a return to work. With social distancing forecast to continue for at least another year, that meant all the sums about the big city centre offices didn't add up any more. If you could only use 50% of your desk space, how could you bring all your staff back to the office?  It's hard to imagine a year's gone by, and here we are asking the same questions again.